Product description

The award-winning short fictions in this collection highlight the voice of an inventive contemporary fantasist who has been compared by critics to Borges, Nabokov, and Kafka. In addition to highlights such as "The Situation," in which a beleaguered office worker creates a child-swallowing manta ray to be used for educational purposes and "Errata," which follows an oddly familiar writer who has marshaled a penguin, a shaman, and two pearl-handled pistols with which to plot the end of the world, this volume contains two never-before-published stories. Chimerical and hypnotic, this compilation leads readers through the postmodern into what is emerging into a new literature of the imagination.

Author information

Jeff VanderMeer is the founder and editor for Ministry of Whimsy Press. He is a regular contributor to Amazon.com's book blog, Omniverous, and his short fiction has appeared in Wired magazine. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida.

Review quote

'I think the need for me to stop reading shows exactly how good Jeff is as a writer. I encourage everyone to give this a go, whether you read it one story at a time with long intervals between each one (like me), or have the stomach to read it all in one go (I applaud you for doing so!). It's very well written, engages the readers imagination, and will make you think about the stories long after you've read them.' - Nayu's Reading Corner blogspot January 2011 "A fine introduction to one of our very best contemporary practitioners of the fantastic." -- Publishers Weekly "These 15 elegantly crafted stories ably demonstrate VanderMeer's skill ... calls to mind the works of Borges, Kafka, and Lem." -- Library Journal , Starred Review "VanderMeer proves again why he is so essential and why everybody should be reading him." --Junot Diaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao "One of the things that sets VanderMeer apart is his embrace of technology and media. His online presence is considerable and includes a number of web sites, frequent blogging, a short film adaptation of his novel Shriek (including collaboration with pop rock band The Church), his Alien Baby photo project and even a project involving animation via Sony Playstation." --Wired.com "Jeff Vandermeer is not to be trusted. He hypnotizes with shiny objects, bizarrely beautiful shapes and phrases, then (more often than not) gently drifts you into very dark places. You won't know where you're going till you get there and then, of course, it's too late." --Mike Mignola, creator, Hellboy "In the hands of a brilliant writer like Jeff VanderMeer, writing fantasy can be a means of serious artistic expression... It is also playful, poignant, and utterly, wildly imaginative." --Peter Straub, author, The Talisman "Fascinating ... the harmonics between the stories cross all sorts of boundaries." --Locus Magazine "Jeff VanderMeer is an extraordinary writer ... passionate, beautiful, complex, terrifying." --Tamar Yellin, author, The Genizah at the House of Shepher